The Link Between Kids Who Walk or Bike to School and Concentration

Every day outside my son’s Brooklyn school, no matter what the weather,
you will see a distinctive pale blue bicycle locked to the rack. It
belongs to a 7th-grade girl from a Dutch family whose members have stuck
with their traditional practice of riding to school each day, despite
finding themselves in the not-so-bike-friendly United States for a few
years. This lovely blue city bike was a gift from the parents to their
eldest child, who is now almost as tall as a grown woman. She has
graduated from riding with her parents, and deserves a first-class
vehicle to get to class each day. She is fiercely proud of it.

According to the results of a Danish study
released late last year, my Dutch friends are giving their daughter a
less tangible but more lasting gift along with that bicycle: the ability
to concentrate better. The survey looked at nearly 20,000 Danish kids
between the ages of 5 and 19. It found that kids who cycled or walked to
school, rather than traveling by car or public transportation,
performed measurably better on tasks demanding concentration, such as
solving puzzles, and that the effects lasted for up to four hours after
they got to school.

The study was part of "Mass Experiment 2012," a Danish project that looked at the links between concentration, diet, and exercise.

Niels Egelund of Aarhus University in Denmark, who conducted the
research, told AFP that he was surprised that the effect of exercise was
greater than that of diet:

"The results showed that having breakfast and lunch has an impact, but
not very much compared to having exercised," Egelund told AFP.

"As a third-grade pupil, if you exercise and bike to school, your
ability to concentrate increases to the equivalent of someone half a
year further in their studies," he added.

The process of getting yourself from point A to point B has cognitive
effects that researchers do not yet fully understand. I wrote last year
about Bruce Appleyard’s examination of cognitive mapping,
in which he compared children who were driven everywhere with those who
were free to navigate their neighborhoods on their own. His work
revealed that the kids whose parents chauffeured them had a much poorer
comprehension of the geography of the places they lived, and also a less
fine-grained knowledge of the landscape around them.

In an article about the Danish study from the Davis Enterprise, Egelund says that he thinks there is a deep connection between the way we move our bodies and the way our minds work:

“I believe that deep down we were naturally and originally not
designed to sit still,” Egelund said. “We learn through our head and by
moving. Something happens within the body when we move, and this allows
us to be better equipped afterwards to work on the cognitive side.”

Lots of parents drive their kids to school because walking or driving
on streets and roads designed exclusively for cars makes the journey
prohibitively dangerous for anyone, especially children. That problem is
not easily solved, especially since schools are increasingly being
built on the edges of sprawling development, rather than in a walkable
context. [PDF]

But many other parents drive their kids because it’s easier, or seems to be easier.
They often frame it as a kindness to the child to spare them “trudging”
all the way to school, even if that trek is only half a mile long. As
these short driving trips become the societal norm, it gets more and
more difficult for families to deviate from them. School traffic begets
school traffic.

So what could turn the trend around? The connection between active transportation and better physical fitness is well-documented and intuitively easy to draw, and yet apparently not compelling enough. As the Davis Enterprise
article points out, even in a U.S. city with relatively good bicycle
infrastructure such as Davis, California, parents continue to drive
their children to school in huge numbers. More than 60 percent of
elementary students in that city arrive for class each morning with
their parents behind the wheel. Nationally, as of 2009, only 13 percent of kids in the United States walked or biked to school, down from 50 percent in 1969.

But if more parents realized that packing the kids into the back seat actually affects their ability to learn,
would they change their ways? Advocate for building schools in more
walkable locations? Demand improved bicycle and pedestrian
infrastructure? Or simply make the time and effort required to get to
the kids to school under their own steam, accompanying them if need be?

Many parents pay for test prep and after-school enrichment programs to
make their kids more academically competitive, and go to great lengths
to schedule time for those activities. Imagine if they invested those
resources instead in something as simple as helping their children to
travel safely from home to school on foot or by bike, arriving ready to
learn.